Research has consistently shown that cigarette smoking, chronic stress, and a sedentary lifestyle can speed up a person’s biological clock. A new study suggests that aging may also be accelerated by exposure to gun violence, a finding that exposes the hidden toll of trauma.
In a report published in the September volume of SSM-Population Health, researchers showed how exposure to deadly neighborhood shootings affected nearly 1,800 15-year-olds. They found that over half of the teenagers in the sample lived near at least one deadly shooting in the prior year, and those exposed to gun violence showed an estimated two-and-a-half-month difference in biological age acceleration and a 5.3 percent faster pace of aging. To measure for aging, the study’s authors used three highly regarded epigenetic clocks — biochemical tests that estimate a body’s biological age.
“It’s very easy for folks to say, ‘Well, this doesn’t directly affect me and doesn’t directly affect a lot of people,’ when in fact, we know from studies like this — and many that preceded this — that those early life exposures, where living in close proximity to where an incident of gun violence happens, can have real long-term implications for young people as they age,” said Julia Fleckman, an author of the study and an associate public health professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
To assess the adolescents’ exposure to gun violence, the researchers used survey data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a long-running longitudinal study of nearly 5,000 children born between 1998 and 2000. They defined neighborhood-level gun violence as the number of fatal shootings within one mile of respondents’ homes in the prior year.
Nandita Somayaji, a doctoral student studying public health at Johns Hopkins University, led similar research published in 2025 that looked at the association between neighborhood gun violence and children’s general health status.
“Their study complements ours,” said Somayaji. “What I really took away from that was they used different data, different methods, and different ways to measure the outcome, but we’re seeing that same pattern that proximity to gun violence affects children’s health trajectories, even without the direct victimization.”
Somayaji and her colleagues found that children living in census tracts with more gun violence were 20 percent less likely to report excellent or good health compared to their peers living in communities with fewer shootings.
“Kids who live in these neighborhoods who hear gunshots, see the police tape, know a friend who unfortunately died or got hurt by gun violence — they’re really absorbing that stress, even though they’re not physically harmed,” Somayaji said.
The new study revealed that Black and Hispanic teens were more likely to be exposed to gun violence and experience a higher intensity of violence, which Fleckman emphasized is more indicative of structural forces rather than biological markers. Gun violence exposure at a younger age in marginalized groups has also been linked to higher rates of emotional distress and adverse mental health, which is associated with accelerated aging.
“By isolating and weighting against essentially different characteristics, and taking out race, all kids that had exposure to gun violence were at increased risk of accelerated aging,” said Fleckman, who is also a director of Washington University’s Center on Violence and Health. “So that helps tell you that it’s not something genetic, but It’s about the exposure to the stressor.”
As gun violence remains the leading cause of death for children and teens, researchers are examining how these deaths will negatively affect the younger generation’s health in the future. Adolescence is a particularly vulnerable period for exposure to trauma that can affect the longer-term trajectory of a person’s life.
“We often talk about the acute, direct effects of gun violence like firearm fatalities and we talk a little bit less about the thousands of non-fatal gun injuries in the U.S. and how those can have life-changing implications,” said Esther Lee, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention.
In 2025, Lee published a study that looked at the connection between cardiovascular death and gun violence among adults in Michigan. Her study found that each additional 10 firearm incidents per year within a census tract was linked to a 1.6 percent increase in the odds of stress-related cardiovascular death among residents.
“We talk even less about the downstream implications of gun violence when people are exposed to it in their communities,” Lee said. “So what’s interesting is that these sorts of studies are evidence that violence is physiologically embedded … which helps to understand some of these broader impacts of firearm injury, and to lay some of the fertile grounds for that.”